Morning Musings
~ Random thoughts on the marvelous reality and relevance of scripture.
Leaning Getting Real Be Thou My Vision
Extend Grace Prompted? True Beauty
Leaning
Trust in the Lord, and lean not on your own understanding. Proverbs 3:5
Here is an interesting thought: consider substituting the usage of the word understanding that John gave us at the beginning of his Gospel: The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it --
as in overcome, conquered, overpowered, mastered...
Hmmm -- yeah, my mastery is pretty limited, while His is sure.
Which would you rather lean on?
Now, let's slice and dice and reassemble:
Trust in the Lord...
*He knows what's best.
**He can, he has the power to make it so.
***He will -- he sees you, hears you, loves you, acts for you (see Romans 8:28).
So... He knows, He can, He will.
Lean not on your own understanding...
Lean -- as in relying on, depending on --
what happens when what you are leaning on falls or is removed?
Down you go. Lean not on your own power or mastery...
Wouldn't it be more sensible, safer, to rely (yes - utterly!) upon God
for what is most important to you today?
Takeaway: Do your Best, and Trust God for the Results.
Getting Real
~If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. 1John 3:17
~What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. James 2:14-17
...as your Actions prove or disprove the Truth of your Love,
...so your Works will prove or disprove the Reality of your Faith.
Be Thou My Vision
I like to sing a bit while driving, biking, walking -- but memorizing four verses is daunting. So, I took a stab at condensing one of my favorite hymns into a single verse. Not an academically correct representation, but one which strings together my favorite ideas from the whole...
Be Thou my Vision, and Thou my True Word;
I ever With Thee, Lord, my Great Shepherd;
Thou my Best Thought, Thy Kingdom so Bright;
Heart of my own Heart, Thy Presence my Light.
The Gospel
The Gospel in short is this: God loves us so much that he wants to spend his life together with us. This life together we call Eternal Life.
Though we are made in His image, we can't reflect His power and perfection -- primarily because we have chosen to go our own way instead of choosing to live in His reality. This state of being out-of-alignment that we find ourselves trapped in we call sin. And in this state, it is quite naturally impossible to fully connect with Him.
In his love for us, God has moved to remedy this situation, to reconcile each of us to Himself. He has revealed a "rightness" (or righteousness) that comes to us entirely by faith... by trusting His nature and love and justice as expressed through his Son Jesus, whom He sent to release us from our bondage so that we can instead enjoy the Eternal Life that He created us for.
For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have Eternal Life.
"...believes..." as in trust, rely upon: Jesus and the Grace he brings to us for the care of our souls and our Life together with God.
Peace
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
This is one of those oft-offered verses of encouragement that increases in power the closer you look. And it is powerful. This verse focuses us on one of the primary outcomes of the Gospel… PEACE.
Peace is not a gift that the world gives to us, on the contrary, it often brings the opposite. In this world you WILL have Trouble. That is – expect it, do not be dismayed that it is so, or demand that it be otherwise. The trouble that we experience in this world is the natural result of the world’s being out of alignment with God… Trouble… kind of inevitable, right?
By contrast, IN ME you may have Peace. Note the juxtaposition of “in me” and “this world.” They are, truly, opposites. One is out of alignment with God, opposed to God; the other is in total alignment with God, IS in fact God.
Simply put, Jesus is the sole basis for true Peace. IN ME means turning godward, believing that God so loved us that He sent Jesus to us with this mission of grace, healing, and divine empowerment, and then relying totally on him for the care of your soul, your life-with-god… This, Jesus tells us, is the basis for true Peace.
Jesus goes on to point out that He has OVERCOME the world. There is a battle, very real, between the Peace that Jesus offers and the Trouble that a fallen world brings. The fact Jesus has overcome the world means that we will find His Peace deeper, stronger, more durable, than the world’s trouble – victorious, in a word.
There is a great deal of Encouragement to be found here.
In Jesus, we have Peace – the certain knowledge that in Him, we have all the resources we need to meet any and every challenge to our Life-with-God.
Love... who?
John's first letter talks a lot about the verb "love" -- as a command, a state of being, a basis for connection with God. In this particular letter, he focuses in on loving our brothers and sisters in the faith. For many, this raises the question, "Do I need to love everyone, or just other Christians?"
Let's see what Jesus said.
First, He identified loving our neighbor as central to the Great Commandment. Then, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, he answered the question "who is my neighbor" as he illustrated what love looks like, and held up a member of a despised ethnic class to exemplify it. He also said to love our enemies. And, of course, fellow believers.
Trouble is, if the command to love pertains primarily to love amongst believers, it puts us in the position of having to judge who else is saved... and that, clearly, is not in our job description.
So the answer, as unpalatable as it may seem, is..... we love, everyone.
Extend Grace
Grace is at the core of the Gospel -- Grace, as in unmerited standing or favor, or simply, not getting what we deserve.
As "children of God" would it be reasonable to assume that we should, imitating Him, extend grace to each other? Imagine: beams of Grace emanating from God, through Jesus, to each of us -- and then multiplying as they emanate from us to those around us... I wish I could draw this!
We might not be called to literally lay down our lives for others the way Jesus did, but we are indeed called to lay our lives (or felt needs) aside momentarily for the sake of another... this is called love. Extending Grace to each other is fundamentally an act of love. So what does this look like?
Simple: Grace is not giving our fellow humans what we might think they deserve... our impatience, our anger, our judgement, our resentment. Refraining from returning hurt for hurt. That is a reliable working definition of Grace, extended from one person to another. Grace.
Pass it on!
Prompted?
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Collosians 3:12
Sometimes we may agonize over the question of how do we know if what we are sensing is the spirit prompting us, or just our own desires being projected...
One simple rule may be:
If it has to do with loving another, then it is from the Spirit,
because God is Love, the Great Commandment is Love, Jesus' ministry was love.
Perhaps does not cover 100% of cases, but very very many......
True Beauty
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11
Yes, he is a God of beauty, isn’t He? The phrase “in its time” adds an interesting reminder. That is, God is sovereign. The beauty springs from His nature alone, and it does so according to His purposes. The what, when, how, and why all belong to Him, only Him.
And one of the chief beauties, perhaps the most beautiful of all, is this idea of and longing for “eternity” that he has set in our hearts. Eternity… not so much in the sense of forever, though that is true. Eternity, in the sense of a different dimension that we are born-again into, recreated into, redeemed into, when we place our faith in Christ, trusting him for the care of our hearts and souls.
Eternity… the Life-with-God dimension. Unfathomable, but good, and beautiful… C.S.Lewis offers an amazing insight here: If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
God has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart, though no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end...
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. That light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can not overcome it. To all who receive him, to those who trust in his name, he gives the right to become children of God. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
Jesus testified: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever puts their trust in him will not perish but have eternal life… I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full. I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart – I have overcome the world!”
And so we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him; be assured that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 John 1:1,4,5,12,16 Romans 3:23-24
John 3:16, 10:10, 16:33 Romans 8:28, 38-39